In recent years, public participation in the Internet has expanded at a rate that has, at times, surprised industry analysts and service providers. This expansion has not escaped the attention of the business community who is actively searching for ways to capitalize on this medium of ever-increasing importance. In the attempt to quickly respond to this phenomenon, the business community and its promotional and advertising consultants have sometimes analogized the Internet to more familiar media in order to analyze business opportunities and apply accumulated experience and wisdom to the unfamiliar and poorly understood new medium. In this regard, some have viewed the Internet as a form of electronic publishing and have focused on printed media as an instructive business paradigm. Others, focusing on the dynamic voice and image potential of Internet communications, have viewed broadcast media as the most instructive source of business experience.
A result of this current tendency to analyze business opportunities on the Internet in view of experiences with more familiar media is that initial advertising efforts on the Internet have closely resembled traditional advertisements in appearance, format and function. Among the most common Internet advertisements are so-called banner advertisements. These advertisements typically appear in high traffic areas such as the home page of a browser, search engine or website, and appear to the user as an area or banner occupying a portion of the monitor working area or graphical desktop. These banners are typically designed much like advertisements in the printed media using well-established principles intended to draw attention away from the primary content to the banner and maximize public response. Others have proposed video or audiovisual commercials in the television style. Such commercials, as in television, would interrupt and be interspersed with the flow of information over the Internet.
Such approaches have not been fully effective. The television style advertisement proposals have met great resistance and, in general, have not been implemented by wary service providers. Banner advertisements have also been quite limited in effectiveness. In either case, although traditional demographic projections have sometimes been used to target classes of consumers (e.g., advertisements for investment services on business information sites), advertisements are often not of interest to specific Internet users and response rates are low. As a result, an exaggerated but common lament in the business community today is that nobody is making money by advertising on the Internet.